Climate change is the most important life issue today - Dan Horan

In recent decades there has been some nasty infighting among Catholics who argue about which life issue is the most important, especially in guiding one's political choices. Some groups — often the loudest — say abortion is the single most important life issue. Others say euthanasia or assisted suicide is the most important. Still others, in keeping with the church's longstanding tradition of the sanctity of all life, say that we cannot single out one such issue but recognize that as Catholics we must maintain a consistent ethic of life, an ethical outlook sometimes referred to as the "seamless garment" approach... 

Instead of working to solve the crisis ...Trump and his administration are actively exacerbating it. According to a New York Times report published last week, the Trump Administration has "rolled back" 84 environmental rules and policies so far.

A glacier lagoon is seen in southern Iceland in July 2017. (CNS/Thomson Reuters Foundation/Thin Lei Win)

... While I agree with the intellectual and moral integrity of the consistent ethic of life principle, which upholds that every human life — born and unborn — is inherently valuable, dignified, and must be protected, we live in a time in which there is now a more fundamental issue that threatens all life: climate change. For this reason, it seems to me dangerously shortsighted to propose directing our attention, argumentative energies, and financial resources to any singular anthropocentric ethical issue. The stakes are too high for us now to be so myopic. 
Global climate change threatens every life now and poses an existential danger to the very condition of the possibility for future life on this planet. If we are called to be moral agents guided by a seamless garment approach, as I believe we are, then climate change is the body on which such a garment hangs.The preservation of particular human lives is predicated on the future of the planet and delicate ecosystems on it that make life possible at all.           .... READ ALL